On Quine

[Philip Thrift]

The Duhem-Quine thesis or even Quine's Two Dogmas really has nothing to do with the composition of underlying reality. They have to do with the languages that we use to model or theorize about reality.

Quine properly belongs to 

Neopragmatism, linguistic pragmatism, or analytic pragmatism is the philosophical tradition that infers that the meaning of words is a function of how they are used, rather than the meaning of what people intend for them to describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopragmatism

@philipthrift

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On Friday, June 26, 2020 at 6:08:51 AM UTC-5 Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 26 Jun 2020, at 11:01, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, June 26, 2020 at 1:37:31 AM UTC-5 Bruno Marchal wrote:

> On 26 Jun 2020, at 00:32, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote: 
> 
> 
> 
> There isn't much more that's been said about the (underdeterminative) nature of theories beyond what Duhem, Quine said decades ago. 

Quine is a materialist? He said this in the frame of Aristotle philosophy. He missed the fact that incompleteness makes some “essence” back in science, like the greeks saw much earlier. So, Quine explanation can’t work when we assume Descartes, Darwin, etc. He needs a non mechanical mind, which, BTW, re-introduced some “essence” too, in metaphysics (where the essence are the most troubling, I would say). 

Bruno 


Duhem-Quine has nothing to do with what is fundamentally "underneath" scientific theories -- it could be matter, minds, numbers, angels, devils, ... .

 

It has to do with the mathematical-linguistic aspects of scientific theories themselves and how they are merely guides to reality and not its scriptures.

But Quine seems to me to be naturalist, at least implicitly. He is usually considered as such. Not sure if I can derive this form the book by Quine that I have, though.

Maybe if you have some link, although this is not quite important, to be sure. Better to discuss ideas than people.

Basically, “we” are all Aristotelian since a long time. That is why some people take time to understand that with Mechanism, the burden of proof or argument is in the hand of the materialist, like providing some evidences. Those evidences have to be indirect, of course, as we can't detect the “primariness” or “primitiveness” directly (that is what the old dream argument debunked since long, although this is mathematically precise only when making explicitly the Mechanist assumption.

Bruno